Oct 7, 2016

It really is all about content – content that is of value and benefit to your target audience and, at the same time, engaging and appealing to see and to read. This is a tall order, because the competition is pretty stiff.

Your website consists of a home page and other landing pages, based upon what you offer to visitors and customers.

It also consists of a blog which you use to provide great information, education, humor, storytelling, and inspiration.

All of the text and all of the visuals and media you create for your website must reach a pretty high bar, if you are to keep your audience engaged.

Fortunately, you do have some tools at your disposal that can make your content creation easier and more appealing.Here are 13 of them.

For Research

You cannot be an authority or an expert without factual information and data.

Most bloggers conduct their research with simple Google or Bing searches. And there is nothing wrong with those, if the keywords you use bring up the information you seek.
You can dig deeper, however.

1. Google Drive Research Tool

If you already use Google drive, this will be the proverbial piece of cake. Google has added a research tool that makes research easier. To use this tool, you can do the following:

Create a new document – click on the “create” button on your home page

When the new document opens, you will see a “tools” in the menu bar. Click on that and choose “Research” from the drop down menu.

You will see a box to enter your keyword(s)

A new pane will open up and give you options of what type of research you want – everything (the whole web), images, scholar (papers, journals, articles), or quotes from famous people.

Part of content creation involves knowing what your competitors are publishing and what your audience is viewing enthusiastically.

Using a tool like Buzzsumo allows you to search for content by keyword(s).

You will get a listing of the most popular content on that topic, including the source and the number of “hits” it received. This will help you to understand what your audience is looking for so that you can meet their needs.

Open the extension in Chrome, search the Gifs, and choose one you like. Then drag and drop it into your content. It really is that simple.

Tools for Writers

Consumers of content are not impressed with large blocks of text that are presented in a mundane or rather boring fashion. They want important information given to them in small chunks; they want to be able to scan a piece of text and hone in on parts that interest them; they want brevity. Beyond that, they love humorous or inspirational content; they also love stories.

You have to catch your readers immediately or they will bounce. That means you take your research, get your topic ideas, and weave those topics into engaging content – this is the hard part. There are some tools for this too.

There’s just so much you can do. You can store notes and ideas; you can store great articles you want to use as start points for your own content; you can keep your calendar of when you need to write; you can write parts of content and store them with no worry of losing your work; the tool syncs to all devices as long as you have an Internet connection.

There is even a function for speaking your content and having it generate the text for you to then edit. You just need it this tool.

Not everyone is creative, and not everyone is creative 100% of the time.

This writing service has an entire department of creative writers specifically for the purpose of creative copywriting for websites and blogs. Provide the topic and any other instructions, and they will go to work, even adding cool visuals.

Think about the news articles that draw you in immediately. The “draw” is the title. It is catchy and intriguing – so much so that you just need to read on. Getting great titles is hard. In fact, writers for Upworthy, a site known for its creative titles, say that they often write 25 titles before finally deciding upon one and then “testing” it for audience engagement.

If you are “title-challenged,” then using a good tool will help. The link above gives you 10 of the best free title generator tools. Just a word of caution: Don’t use them verbatim A lot of other content writers are using these tools too. Use them to give you solid ideas and to get our own creativity going.

Co-schedule has a headline analyzer that will also provide you with a score based upon specific criteria – emotional appeal, for example. It will also make suggestions for word changes.

Brevity and simplicity is the key to content that will be read and digested by your audience. This goes for everything from product descriptions to blog posts. There is both a desktop and a mobile app version. You paste in your content and get great feedback on sentences that are too wordy, too difficult, have unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, or phrases that can be shortened and simplified. Here is a sample from the home page:

Note that you will also get a reading level. In the case of this sample, the reading level is grade 6 and that is considered good for web content.

For Visuals and Media

This is one of the best all-around tools for creating visuals, and it is super-fast and easy. It has a phenomenal library of templates and other elements that you can manipulate by drag and drop.

You can add your own stuff, use theirs, or have a combination.

The best part is that there are so many elements and graphic for free, you may not even need the premium feature, although they only share $1 for each element or graphic you select. The great thing about this tool is that there are tutorials for everything you want to do.

You may not know this, but Google has quite a library of fonts (over 600 actually). You just access the tools, choose your font and download it.

Of course, there are lots of font tools other than Google that let you create your own fonts.

12. Memes

You can use memes for humorous, inspirational or poignant content and increase visitor engagement.

Probably the best source for trending memes that you can use is MemeGenerator.net. You can search for memes in several categories and then add your own text.

13. Videos

If you have an iPhone, you can make a video. Explainer and “how to” videos are really popular right now, especially if they focus on the value and benefit of your product or service. Content consumers today, especially with their mobile devices and accessing content from a variety of places, appreciate videos rather than text.

For examples of top videos and a full explanation of how to create one, check out this Wordstream Post.
You will also want to check out video editing software, and these tools have made it easy.

That’s a Wrap

There is not “magic bullet” for creating great content.

It takes lots of thought, good research, great creative writing, and visuals, if you intend to keep your visitors engaged.

While these tools make content creation easier, they are not a substitute for your passion.